Do you experience frequent and severe migraines? We have selected the best apps to help you deal with migraines based on their quality, reviews by their users, and their effectiveness to log migraine triggers and provide support for individuals living with the condition. A migraine is more than just a headache; it is a complex neurological condition that features a wide range of symptoms, including severe head pain, disturbed vision, sensitivity to light, smells, and sounds, and nausea and vomiting. Most people with a migraine are unable to work or function normally during an episode. Migraines affect around 39 million individuals in the United States and are most common between age 25 and 55. Migraines tend to run in families, with around 90 percent of those who experience migraine reporting a family history of the condition. While the cause of a migraine is not entirely understood, temporary changes in the nerves, blood vessels, and chemicals in the brain are thought to play a role. Factors that may trigger a migraine include hormonal changes, foods, drinks, stress, sensory stimuli, changes in the wake-sleep pattern, physical factors, variations in the environment, and medications. Migraine-specific apps can pinpoint which of these factors trigger your migraine so that you can change your behavior or know what to avoid. Some of the apps may even help you to achieve some relief from the pain. Here are Medical News Today's choices of the best 10 apps for migraines. Migraine Buddy Android: Free iPhone: Free Migraine Buddy is a migraine diary and tracking app designed by data scientists and neurologists. The app allows you to record your migraine frequency and duration, pain location and intensity, and symptoms and medications, as well as to identify migraine triggers. An attack is recorded using the bold icon on the dashboard. The migraine start and end time are logged along with the type of attack, pain level, your location when your migraine began, and potential triggers. The app also records any signs that presented before the attack, migraine symptoms, medication taken, relief methods that you used, how your migraine affected your daily tasks, and a head map to select the area of your pain. After entry, the dashboard shows you how long you have been attack-free. The record of your attack is stamped on the calendar and can be accessed through the records section. The reports dashboard gives insights about your migraines and factors that could be linked to their onset. Ouchie iPhone: Free Ouchie is a social platform designed to help with pain management. Post an update to your Ouchie profile in the same way that you would on Facebook or Twitter. Posts include data on where you feel pain, pain intensity, and the latest treatments that you have tried. You are then forwarded to a community migraine feed with people who are sharing similar pain symptoms and may even have some tips to reduce the pain that you are experiencing. As you log your pain and treatment progress and support others, you unlock more milestones. Finding others who can relate to your pain and share what has worked for them could also help you to manage your migraines. Blue Light Filter for Migraine - Eye Shield Android: Free Blue Light Filter for Migraine - Eye Shield is a blue light filter app designed to protect your eyes from the blue wavelength emitted by screens. Exposure to blue light at night can disrupt your normal sleep cycle and circadian rhythm and is linked with insomnia and migraine. The creators of the app say that blue light flux increases migraine pain and activates the trigeminal nerve, which is associated with migraines. The filter dims the screen and helps you to avoid the adverse effects of blue light flux. Blue Light Filter for Migraine - Eye Shield boasts three pre-made blue light filters to use depending on the light intensity in your environment, screen dimming protection optimal for the prevention of head pain, and customization of temperature palette, color palette, and RGB color filters. Migraine Coach iPhone: Free Migraine Coach is a personalized migraine diary with alerts. The app gives you migraine warnings, insights, and preventative coaching. Migraine Coach tests and deciphers your migraine triggers scientifically and helps you to replace habits that contribute toward your migraine with ones that promote your health. The app notifies you when your risk of a migraine is exceptionally high and provides you with educational and behavioral guidance to reduce the frequency, duration, and severity of your migraines. The trigger and protector discovery map pinpoints factors that either trigger or protect against a migraine and charts them in a colorful report. You can also track your medications and therapies, as well as their effectiveness, to share with your physician. Migraine Relief Hypnosis Android: Free iPhone: Free Migraine Relief Hypnosis aims to train you to ease and relax your body to soothe the discomfort of migraine pain. The app provides a single audio session that, when listened to daily, is reported to reduce the pain and discomfort of migraine pain in just 1 to 3 weeks. The audio combines the soothing voice of a certified hypnotherapist with peaceful nature sounds and background music to help you relax. The Hypnotic Booster level can be increased to induce your brainwave frequency into the optimal state for hypnotic suggestions. If you use the app before bed, the Awaken at End feature can be disabled to allow you to drift off into a restful sleep. The audio can also be looped while you are sleeping and you can continue to listen to the background sounds after the session ends. Relax Lite Android: Free iPhone: Free Relax Lite is an app that provides guided breathing and meditation exercises. Its aim is primarily to reduce overall stress, but its benefits include the fact that it helps in managing migraines and headaches. Upon installing the app, you are asked to choose a theme from a variety of calming images. You are then invited, via a straightforward and intuitive user interface, to choose whether you want to try a Quick Start, Breathing, or Meditation. Our fast-paced lives can often lead to stress, which can trigger headaches and migraines if left unchecked. An app such as Relax Lite could help you to remember to take time out to focus on your well-being, which could, in turn, help to prevent migraines from occurring. Symple iPhone: Free Symple is an easy way to track how you feel, keep tabs on your health, and improve your well-being. On download, you can choose up to five symptoms to manage, including migraine, migraine with aura, light sensitivity, nausea, and vomiting. If you experience one of your five symptoms, you can log when they occurred and their severity. In addition to your symptoms, you can record factors that influenced how you felt, such as meditation, excessive screen time, and yoga. Snap a photo per day, or up to 10 on the upgraded version, to record influencing factors - perfect for seeing how medications or food affect your health. Upgrading also unlocks unlimited symptoms and factors, the journal feature, and secure passcode protection. Curelator Headache & Migraine iPhone: Free Curelator Headache & Migraine is designed to allow people who experience migraines to identify and manage factors that influence their risk of an attack. Curelator says that unlike other apps wherein individuals record their data and try to guess their migraine triggers, Curelator Headache & Migraine measures the impact of a variety of factors on the app's user and lets them test behavioral changes that might reduce the frequency or severity of their migraine attack. You need to spend 2 to 3 minutes each day on the app tracking up to 70 migraine-related factors for 90 days. After this period, you receive an Individual Protector Map, Individual Trigger Map, Suspected Trigger Map, No Association Map, and a Personal Analytical Report that you can share with your healthcare provider. This app is recommended for people who experience two or more migraines per month. BrainWave Binaural Headache Relief with Ambience iPhone: $0.99 Brainwave Binaural Headache Relief with Ambience synchronizes your brainwaves to a particular frequency to provide migraine relief through deep relaxation. Two different audible frequencies are sent to each ear, which are perceived as a low-frequency tone that matches human brainwaves. The app's developers indicate that various states of mind have been connected with these low frequencies, which range from alert and focused to deep sleep. The low frequencies are reported to let your mind relax. The brainwave signals can be adjusted independently of the soothing background nature sounds, which include rain, ocean waves, thunder, and pink noise. White Noise Free Android: Free iPhone: Free Lack of quality sleep is thought to be a trigger for migraines and headaches. White Noise Free aims to help you sleep easier by providing a variety of calming sounds at bedtime. The free version of the app provides 40 ambient sounds out of the box, with paid options to download additional sounds as required. It also provides a sleep clock and an alarm that gradually increases volume to gently wake you up as opposed to the usual shock to the system experienced with a regular alarm clock. The built-in sounds are of high quality, and you can also create mixes of the sounds, or even record your own. If you are someone who has trouble sleeping and think this could be a trigger for your migraines, this app could help you to regain control of your sleep patterns. Source
